Stuff

Fascinating stuff

The latest issue of SIMULATION & GAMING has an interesting article by Zagal, Rick, and Hsi: Collaborative games: Lessons learned from board games.
It seeks to explore collaborative games, focusing on board games in order to extract principles which can be used by video game designers.

The article makes interesting points, and a few debatable ones (here I’ll just quibble about theory, without adressing the content).
The article starts of by delivering the “good news” that the number of single-player games will probably soon decrease. A rather odd normative statement. Continue reading Fascinating stuff

Looking for game examples

I’m looking for a game (preferably a board game or card game) in which all players start out with full knowledge of the game state but where, in the course of the game, things happen which do not become known to all players.

By “full knowledge of the game state” I mean that the position and type of every “unit” is known and that the exact goals of all players are known.

In Risk, for instance, the players don’t have full knowledge to begin with (they draw secret mission cards) and things happen which are not revealed. In Chess players DO have full initial knowledge AND are informed of all events/changes.

All help is appreciated.

(in economic game theory terms I’m looking for a game of complete but imperfect information)

Addendums:
1) Players have “perfect recall”, they don’t forget what they saw happening in the past just because things get complex.
2) By “start out” I mean the state of the game just before the first player does anything, i.e. before the players start interacting.

UK gamers dissected

The grandfather of Public Service broadcasting, the BBC, just published an impressive report surveying the habits, preferences, demographics etc. of UK gamers.

It contains bundles of well-presented facts. Like:
– Young age and chance of being a gamer correlate positively (not surprising)
– 48% of respondents were “heavy” gamers i.e. they play at least once a week and up to daily, whereas only 7% are “medium” and 4% are light. This seems to indicate that if you play then you are likely to play more than a little (it also indicates, of course, that the categories might not be entirely intuitive)
– Gender has extremely limited influence on frequency of playing
– 6-10 year olds “prefer” the PC as a platform (over individual consoles etc.) while for other age groups the PS2 takes over (although I’m not entirely sure how”Preferred device” is measured here)

Also, the report sums up interesting findings on genre preferences and gender:

Simulations and MMOGs perform equally well with males and females, while RPGs and Strategy fare only marginally better with males. Females then show strong approval for Music/Dance, Puzzles/Board/Quiz, and
Classic games. Males show strong approval for Action-Adventure, Racing, Sports, and First Person Shooters. Simulations and MMOGs seem to be key to attracting audiences of both genders equally: Sports and Shooting category games generally hold the lowest appeal for females, although it should be noted that this doesn’t mean they have no appeal: 12% of females play First Person Shooters.

Via BoingBoing

Know a game like this?

There is a scene in Babe – The Gallant Pig where the pig protagonist is informed of a password which may be used to entice sheep to give crucial help in terms of dire need.
Okay, this introduction is going the wrong way, so just forget it.

My problem is this. I’m looking for an example of a game where:

– One player does not fully know what the other player can do or where one player does not know the other player’s goal (i.e. what he wants to do)

AND

– The players are not informed of all choices made by the other(s).

An example of not knowing the other player’s goal would be the secret missions handed out before a Risk game begins. An example of not being informed of the actions of the other player would be being unable to see the other player’s section of the gamespace (as in Civilization, Age of Empires etc.).

Is there such a game?

Vivid metaphor

Sure, everyone’s ranting about the sad state of game journalism. But good researchers like to take one step back and rant about the ranting. Superb ones, it follows, talk about others who rant about ranting. Here’s what Bryan-Mitchell Young wrote:

"Complaining about horrible videogame journalism is like complaining about someone staining the couch cushion when the couch is sitting in the middle of a garbage dump. It may be accurate and a valid complaint, but it is kind of missing the point."

And I just thought that was pretty funny.